Entertainment
John Wayne Set Out To End The Era Of ‘Phony’ Western Heroes – My Blog
It’s been nearly half a century since John Wayne last donned his iconic stetson hat to play a Western hero, but the actor’s name is still synonymous with America’s collective image of the Wild West cowboy. During the golden age of Hollywood Westerns, Wayne was the most recognizable gunslinger around, and he won the hearts of millions playing tough, imperfect, sometimes irascible men fighting their way through the rough-and-tumble frontier. From “Stagecoach” to “The Shootist,” Wayne frequently embodied what many remember as the prototypical on-screen cowboy.In reality, though, Westerns existed on screen even before Wayne made his cinematic debut in the 1920s, and the actor wasn’t particularly fond of the way they tended to be portrayed. “I made up my mind,” Wayne told Maurice Zolotow for his biography “John Wayne, Shooting Star,” “that I was going to play a real man to the best of my ability. I felt many of the Western stars of the 1920s and 1930s were too goddamn perfect.” Beginning in 1934, censorship from the now-infamous Hays Code put a moral responsibility on Hollywood that restricted violence on-screen. Even before the Hays Code, many on-screen cowboys (like other early film figures) had a sense of costume to them, and Western heroes often looked more like playactors than real down-and-dirty cowpokes.‘They were too goddamn sweet’Paramount PicturesWayne took issue with this. “They never drank nor smoked. They never had a fight,” the actor lamented in Zolotow’s biography. “A heavy might throw a chair at them, and they just look surprised.” Wayne famously played some questionable antiheroes along with his white-hat roles, as in John Ford’s “The Searchers.” That 1956 film grappled with — though didn’t completely address — long-brewing questions about violence, racism, and gender dynamics within the genre. Wayne’s Ethan was a revenge-driven antihero who shattered the illusion of the morally pristine cowboy once and for all.“They were too goddamn sweet and pure to be dirty fighters,” Wayne says of the early film cowboys. He adds:“Well, I wanted to be a dirty fighter if that was the only way to fight back. If somebody throws a chair at you, hell, you pick up a chair and belt him right back. I was trying to play a man who gets dirty, who sweats sometimes, who enjoys really kissing a gal he likes, who gets angry, who fights clean whenever possible but will fight dirty if he has to.”Ironically, this portrait of a cowboy sounds just as oversimplified and idealized now as the 1920s cowboys did to Wayne at the time. The Western genre has mostly died out in recent decades as its traditional templates of racism, nationalism, and machismo have fallen out of fashion. When it has returned, it’s been with fresh spins on the cowboy story that reveal facets of the archetype rarely put to screen before, as with Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” and Jane Campion’s “Power of the Dog.” Both of those movies center the stories of gay cowboys, a notion that Wayne himself would likely find blasphemous if his homophobic reaction to “Midnight Cowboy” is any indication.What counts as ‘phony’ anyway?
NetflixWayne isn’t alone in his homophobic attitudes. The idealization of the “manly man” cowboy has always gone hand in hand with an unstated put-down of anyone less-than, whether that’s actual gay cowboys (who did exist, of course) or simply men who didn’t perform the gruff, reckless sort of physical masculinity that Wayne popularized on screen. Just last year, actor Sam Elliott made comments about “Power of the Dog” that echoed Wayne’s from the early ’70s, criticizing the shirtless cowboys and “allusions to homosexuality” in the film. “What the f*** does this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American West?” Elliott said on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast. In his biography, Wayne condemns the squeaky-clean cowboys of the era before him. “I didn’t want to be a singing cowboy,” he says. “It was phony.”The ironic thing about these juxtapositions between the cowboys Wayne and Elliott don’t like and the “real” men they idealize is that both treat the less overtly masculine portrayals as inauthentic in a way that offends them personally — as if they themselves were real cowboys, not actors who grew up in Portland and studied at USC, respectively. This isn’t to say that Wayne and Elliott aren’t qualified to have strong opinions on the matter, but that Westerns have always dealt in American mythology, which is ever-shifting and much more complex than a single portrayal of masculinity.There’s no way of knowing how Wayne would feel about the recent return of movies about cowboys aren’t brawlers, but we do know that Wayne was aware of the way he shaped that image in the first place. “You could say, I made the Western hero a roughneck,” he says in “John Wayne, Shooting Star.” And the genre was never the same again.
Entertainment
NCIS star Pauley Perrette now unrecognisable after quitting acting
For 15 seasons, Pauley Perrette was synonymous with her character Abby Sciuto, a forensic specialist on NCIS.
But in 2017, she shocked fans by announcing she wouldn’t be returning to the popular crime show. At the time of the announcement, Perrette said it was a decision made a year earlier.
Since then, she has only appeared in the now defunct sitcom Broke, going from a fixture on television to rarely seen. Perrette now says she’ll “never again” return to acting.
“I’m not ungrateful for the benefits that it gave to me,” she said in an interview with HELLO! “But I’m a different person now and I want to be here for it – the good and the bad and the painful.”
“I want to be me all the time,” she continued. “And it takes a good amount of courage for me to say that to myself, but it’s authentically how I feel.”
“At this point in my life I have this deep need to find authenticity in everything, and being an actor, especially at certain points in my life, was a great escape; it’s like a drug because I didn’t have to be me, I could be somebody else. My character didn’t have all of the problems that I was having.”
But Perrette hasn’t completely turned her back on the entertainment industry. She’s now producing films, specifically documentaries; her most recent project being Studio One Forever in 2023.
“It’s why I only watch documentaries, I want the truth. For me, going back to being an actor would be taking away from this life of true authenticity that I’m living 100 per cent of the time.”
Days after Perrette’s final NCIS episode aired in May 2017, she wrote on social media that she’d endured “multiple physical assaults,” implying that was the real reason she had exited the program.
Fans remained devastated, hoping she’d return, but the actress insisted she wouldn’t. In June 2019, Perrette implored the public to stop asking if she’d ever reprise her role, claiming she was “terrified” of former co-star Mark Harmon, “and him attacking me.”
There were reports that the two clashed on set because of a dog bite, but that has never been confirmed.
CBS later announced that Perrette had shared workspace concerns before exiting the show and that the network had investigated. Perrette expressed her appreciation for both the studio and the network.
NCIS is still on the air – its 22nd season premieres on screens this month.
Entertainment
Can you solve this puzzle?
Entertainment
Look closer, the photographer was not expecting this photo
For most couples, their wedding day is the happiest day of their lives.
A wedding is a celebration of love between two people who choose to spend their lives together. It marks the start of a new journey filled with shared experiences, personal growth, and mutual support.
A wedding is a happy time for the whole family to come together. From saying vows to sharing the first dance, weddings are full of special moments that create lasting memories. These memories are cherished by the couple and their loved ones for years.
When planning their wedding, couples carefully consider every detail to make sure it’s perfect. From choosing the venue to picking the décor and theme, weddings show the couple’s unique love story.
However, in trying to give their guests a unique experience, some couples do strange things. Whether they regret it when they look back at their wedding photos years later, we don’t know. But we do know that some weddings are so awkward they make us question the bride and groom’s sanity, while others are so fun they make us smile.
Check out the video below to see some of the most interesting weddings you’ve ever seen.
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